NEW BRUNSWICK, NJ — The Heldrich Hotel in New Brunswick is being converted into a professional training facility for young people from Middlesex County who want to work in the hospitality industry.
The 11-story, 35,000-square-foot hotel will be “reimagined as a professional development center for a range of degree programs, including hospitality, culinary arts, construction management, business administration and careers such as heating, ventilation and air conditioning or electrical engineering,” Middlesex County officials announced at a press conference held at the hotel on Thursday.
Previously, the Heldrich was partly owned by the Middlesex County Improvement Authority, but also had private owners.
But with an investment of $16 million, Middlesex County will now take full ownership of the hotel.
The Heldrich Hotel, which also has a conference center, will remain a fully functioning hotel where guests can book rooms or conference space. Students from Middlesex Community College and Middlesex County Magnet Schools (the county’s vocational high schools) will work there. Middlesex County teens and young people will do hands-on work alongside the Heldrich’s unionized employees.
Many new developments and changes are coming in New Brunswick:
- The Jack & Sheryl Morris Cancer Center, New Jersey’s first freestanding cancer hospital, is nearly completed and is scheduled to open before the end of 2024.
- Rutgers, Princeton University, Hackensack Meridian and RWJBarnabas plan to come together under one roof in downtown New Brunswick, on a campus to be called the New Jersey Innovation + Technology Hub — “The Hub” for short. Governor Phil Murphy strongly supports the idea.
- The HUB will be a 10-story, 51,000-square-foot, $665 million complex on Albany Street, directly across from the NJ Transit/Amtrak station in New Brunswick. Murphy envisions it as New Jersey’s answer to Google’s Mountain View campus or Silicon Valley, a place where products like the next iPhone or a new life-saving cancer treatment are invented. The HUB is scheduled to open in 2026.
- The Israeli University of Tel Aviv has already agreed to become the first tenant in the HUB.
- A building in the HUB will be the new home of the Rutgers Robert Wood Johnson Medical School.
- Other buildings in the hub will be the HELIX (New Jersey Health + Life Science Exchange), i.e. innovation and research laboratories.
- And Nokia Bell Labs announced last December that it will leave its current headquarters in Murray Hill (Berkeley Heights in Union County) and move to HELIX in 2028. Nokia will move about 1,000 employees to New Brunswick and intends to make New Brunswick its new global research and development headquarters.
“The county’s investment in the Heldrich Hotel & Conference Center is an investment in the continued economic growth of Middlesex County and New Brunswick,” said New Brunswick Mayor Jim Cahill. “The real-world, hands-on training opportunities students receive prepare them well for exciting and varied careers.”
